Books, Writing, Music, Wine…the good stuff.

Karen MacNeil

It’s an exciting time to live in Cincinnati, an observation I share wistfully since I haven’t lived there full-time in almost twenty years. But, I’m back to visit my very large, wonderful family and group of friends so often that I usually clock nearly a month’s worth of time there in a good year, which is often enough to still feel connected, but infrequent enough to realize that a lot can change in between visits. Most of this change has to do with the revitalization of downtown and Over-the-Rhine, and what’s interesting about it all is that Cincinnati has found its way forward by going back to its roots. Why it took a predominantly Germanic, historic brewery town so long to catch on to the microbrewery/craft beer craze can only be explained by the famous words of Mark Twain that every Cincinnatian knows by heart: “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati: it takes ten years for anything to get there.” Several sets of my great-great(-great) grandparents were among the German immigrants who put Cincinnati on the map, so I’m happy to see some of their legacy continue on; I’m particularly excited to go on one of the underground brewery tours that are now offered. I’m hoping that there might even be mention of my Great-Great Grandfather, Daniel Pohlar, whose Pohlar Cafe was open on Vine Street from at least the 1920s until 2006 (as far as I can tell)

But I must confess to something, and I hope my German forebears aren’t reading over my shoulder: I like beer, but I don’t love it. I’m giddy about the re-blooming beer culture because I can’t wait to see what it will mean for Cincinnati. For me, the most exciting discovery of recent years has been on the northern end of Hamilton County, in Colerain, where you’ll find the Vinoklet Winery, the only working winery with a vineyard in the Cincinnati area. It’s been in operation for thirty years, so it isn’t part of the recent Cincy renaissance (the Cincissance…has anyone coined that yet? If not, I’m copyrighting it!). Rather, it was there all through my childhood, just hiding, and not simply waiting for me to reach drinking age, but waiting for me to reach 35 before I would ever come across it. And the real kicker is that once I found it (by randomly searching the internet to see if there were such a thing as Cincinnati wine), I shared this excellent news with my family and friends, most of whom had already heard of it but never told me (still upset, I am).

Me and my Great-great-great Grandparents, Joseph and Walburga (aka “Becky”…naturally) Hilpoltsteiner. They’re buried on the land that used to be their farm.

But I’m forgiving, if grudgingly so: the place is really so beautiful, I wish that I’d been making it a regular stop during visits home for years now. It’s so far on the outskirts of Cincinnati that you still pass farms to reach it (including my great-great-great grandparents’ farm-turned-church/cemetery). The winery itself was a dairy farm in a previous life, but now its verdant hills are strung with rows on rows of grapes of all kinds. You’re welcome to order a glass of wine at the restaurant and wander through the vineyard on your own as I did with friends and family on a visit home last summer. I highly suggest that you do, and right at sunset as we did.

The wines themselves are…good. And that is high praise for an Ohio wine. Karen MacNeil’s Wine Bible gives exactly zero pages to Ohio wines, despite the decent number of wineries near Lake Erie or on its islands. I’ve had those wines many times over the years, and I understand why they don’t merit her attention (although Pennsylvania gets a brief write-up, and I can’t imagine PA wines are much different than Ohio’s). They often taste like they ought to be spread on bread with some peanut butter. Mind you, the wineries there are beautiful and worth the visit even if the wines themselves are jammy, and even a wine that tastes like fruit juice can be enjoyable on a hot, humid midwestern summer day — they just don’t compete with more sophisticated wines from the rest of the world.

But the wine from Cincinnati…it’s a different story. Now, it’s got a ways to go before it can compete with, say, Oregon — but it can definitely win a fight against any of the New York wines I’ve had (and New York gets 19 pages of coverage in the Wine Bible — just sayin’). Yes, they’re fruity, and yes, they tend to be sweet, but what came to mind as I had a glass of Vinoklet’s Cincinnatus was not another Ohio red from Lake Erie, but a cross between a Beaujolais Nouveau (up front) and a smoky Spanish

A random couple I caught in a tender moment.

tempranillo (on the finish). That’s right: French and Spanish. And their Dreamer reminded me of a good quality New York riesling. They are sweet and fruity, but they’ve got character. They don’t taste like something you’d give to a child so that she could make believe she’s having an adult drink. In other words, they taste like legitimate wines.

Vinoklet also boasts a restaurant with an excellent menu and a light-hearted atmosphere thanks to its display of quirky antiques. Check their website because they host a lot of fun events every month (including grill-your-own steak nights). So if you live in the ‘Nati and you’ve never gone, go! And if you’re passing through town, well, do all the downtowny things if its your first visit — because they really are great, too, and it’s nice to see the city bustling again — but then get in your car and drive north to check out Cincinnati’s wine country. It’s worth the trip.

Everything’s better with wine, but wine is better with lifelong friends.

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Been awhile since I’ve written a wine homework post, and it’s not for lack of drinking. More of a lack of focus, really; how appropriate, then, that tonight’s topic is expressiveness. Here’s what Karen MacNeil has to say about it:

Expressiveness is the quality a wine possesses when its aromas and flavors are well-defined and clearly projected. While some wines seem muddled and diffused, others beam out their character with almost unreal clarity and focus. Imagine the image projected by an out-of-focus black-and-white television without a cable hook-up compared to the same image in high-density color. An expressive wine is like the latter. (The Wine Bible, 5)

To grasp the concept, she suggests the reader try a sauvignon blanc from New Zealand. In my initial forays into wine tasting and writing, I was more focused on France, Spain and Germany — figured I’d head to the southern hemisphere eventually, but intended to explore things methodically and in a certain order.

However, life happens, plans change, paths emerge, et cetera. Now it’s January and my sister came down from Connecticut to visit us in our new place in Hoboken for the very first time. Whereas my wine-o-meter is set to ‘fast, loose and easy,’ hers is set to ‘pinot grigio and sauvignon blanc, preferably, and aged ONLY in steel, NO OAK.’ She’s a bit fussier than me. But since I’m adaptable (and she’s so damned particular), I walked her to the local wine shop (Sparrow Wines) and had her pick out whatever she liked. In her defense, although she has her go-to bottles, she’s adventurous to a degree and she loves New Zealand whites — particular those from the Marlborough region. She found the NZ section of the store immediately and taught me a thing or two (for one thing, I hadn’t even found that aisle in almost two years of shopping there…).

My first taste of New Zealand.

We ended up buying two bottles, both sauvignon blanc: a 2013 Kono and a 2012 Mohua (click the links to see the beautiful vineyards that produce these wines!). I picked the Kono, actually, for a reason completely unrelated to wine: the first sentence on the back read, “We are Maori, the first people of Aotearoa/New Zealand.” Now, I’ve never been to NZ; in fact, the only Kiwis I’ve ever even gotten to talk to were three girls who were part of a Shamrocker Tour around Ireland I went on in my 20s (who taught me about drinking games that would make an American fratboy blush (The Pelican, anyone?), and who helped me to distinguish between Ozzie and Kiwi accents). BUT, when I was about 12 years old (circa 1989), still many years before the internet was accessible everywhere, I paid five dollars to one of those pen-pal agencies that advertised in kids’ magazines, got 5-10 addresses for other kids all over the globe, wrote to them all, and the only one who wrote back was a Maori girl from New Zealand. Her name escapes me now (Leslie, maybe?), but she was from Nelson on the South Island, which (I’ve learned) is pretty darn close to Marlborough.

Despite the fact that I’ve forgotten her name, I treasured her letters. As a kid in southern Ohio, it was such a thrill to receive mail from the other side of the globe from someone whose life was so different…and yet so similar to mine. The Kono bottle instantly brought her to mind, and with her the feeling of being a Midwestern kid who knew that world travel was in his future, but who didn’t know exactly how it would ever come about (poor as I was).

Anyway, the wine.

NZ sauvignon blancs are electric — if these two are to be trusted. The Kono in particular has a tartness to it which I have not enjoyed in other whites I’ve had, but in this one I feel like…. Well, this is a reference you’ll probably only get if you were a child of the 80s, but it brings to mind a Lite Brite. Remember how the plastic peg could be completely dull, but the moment you pierced it through the black construction paper it lit up in vibrant color? The Kono is like that. It neither looked nor smelled remarkable, but the first sip lit my face up with a smile. Lemon and grass and lemongrass…its flavors were pronounced and astounding. Whatever I’d tried in the past that had led me to think poorly of sauvignon blanc, well — this was completely different.

The Mohua was nothing like the Kono. Whereas the Kono seemed to concentrate all of its flavors up front, then explode like a firework, the Mohua was the opposite. It was broad at first, not bland, but it took awhile for its flavors to settle. Once they did, the flavor was…green beans. Now that might not sound at all appealing, but that’s because you’re thinking of soggy beans that have been cooked with ham for hours and hours. That’s not what I’m talking about. To understand what I mean, you need to pick them fresh from your back yard in the summer in the late afternoon, call them haricots verts, steam them very lightly and serve them with a lemon butter. The Mohua’s green bean finish was really very pleasant. When I said as much, my sister gave her affirmation and then we read MacNeil’s section on NZ where she writes that the sauvignon blanc can evoke flavors of “green olives, green figs, green tea, green melons, plus a host of green vegetables from snow peas to green beans” (Wine Bible 810). I, for one, was smugly pleased to have named the taste before reading it in the wine expert’s writing.

So what have I learned about expressiveness? Well, I learned that these NZ whites really pop in a way I haven’t yet experienced with sauvignon blancs from other regions. Their flavors, though different from one another, were mutually distinct. And they’ve inspired me to mine the cave of my memories, free associate and write more than a thousand words about them, so I guess that counts for expressive.

From a practical standpoint, I highly recommend these two wines, and I’m looking forward to tasting even more from the region.

(And I’m going to remember my penpal’s name in the middle of the night, I just know it…)

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As stated in the previous post, the first quality that I want to explore is connectedness. Admittedly, the post about Rioja already addressed this to a degree: its connection to Spain and Spanish culture is what led to my Aha! wine moment. But MacNeil‘s the expert, and if she says I should get to know this quality through a Mosel riesling, then I’m sure as heck gonna try.

Knight I bought in Salzburg guarding the Fritz Haag Riesling

The riesling I chose was a 2011 Fritz Haag, a wine I picked more or less at random in the store but was happy to find that it’s one of MacNeil’s Mosel-Saar-Ruwer “wines to know.” She writes, “The wines that Fritz Haag makes from the incredible sundial — Sonnenuhr — vineyard located above the village of Brauneberg are, year in and year out, classic examples of perfect Mosel riesling.” Praise indeed.

Here is my impression. The wine has a flirty blonde color that I’ve notice is common to rieslings I’ve tried — not yellow like some chardonnays, but flaxen. It’s nose was harder to describe, and all I can really come up with is this: fresh air. It’s getting humid here in the NYC tri-state area, but when I stuck my nose in a glass of this riesling, it was like a cool dry Spring day with highs in the 70s (or 20s in centigrade; this is a European wine, after all…).

If its fragrance was Spring, its taste was pure Winter — breathing in deeply on a day that’s below freezing. And peaches. Underripe, when the texture of the peach is hard and harsh, but the taste — what little there is — is crisp, clean and a little tart. Finally, (and this is probably a bit of a sacrilege, but I’ll write it anyway), it tasted a bit like a Radler, a mixture of a lager and Sprite common to Germanic lands and perfect for a workday lunch.

So how does any of this bring to mind the Mosel region and the wine’s connection to it?

Well, to get there, I have to travel by way of autobiography. I grew up in Cincinnati, a city whose seasonal extremes have led me to say frequently that it’s the hottest and the coldest place I have ever been. All of my descriptors above are references to the seasons of Cincinnati, which, as it happens, sits along a river not unlike the Mosel. In fact, whatever quirks and idiosyncratic delights that Cincinnati may boast are usually traceable to the people’s German heritage, from our breweries to our Schützenfesten to saying “please?” quizzically when we don’t understand what you’ve said (the German equivalent of “bitte?”). You can still attend mass in German if you visit Over-the-Rhine, a neighborhood whose hillside position overlooking the Ohio River reminded its settlers of home. Most high schools in Cincinnati offered German until recently (which is why yours truly studied the language from 7th through 12th grades).

I’ve never been to the Mosel, but I’ve spent some time now reading about it and looking up pictures online. It feels like home. It came up in conversation recently: a friend is planning to ride his bike there, stopping occasionally at this vineyard and that, drinking riesling all week. It never occurred to me to do that, but now that it has, it’s the top of my travel list.

Fritz Haag’s website revealed to me that their wines were beloved by Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon alike. I spent a big chunk of the Fall reading a biography of Alexander Hamilton that featured Jefferson prominently (because they hated one another), and I’m currently writing a screenplay that is about Napoleon and what he means to the people of Sandusky, Ohio (kind of). In fact, I have a few Napoleonic blogposts fomenting in my head as l’Empereur determines exactly what I should write. I’ve also been commissioned this week to write a destination travel piece on Frankfurt, the largest city in Hesse and not far from the Mosel region….

What?

Yes. I know.

I still haven’t answered how this riesling is connected to the Mosel.

And I’m sorry, Karen MacNeil, but I can’t, not really. Not without having been there to taste it where it was grown and produced. Your book tells me it takes on the flavor of the minerals in the slate that it grows from, and I believe you, but I can’t pick those notes out yet.

The connectedness that I’m experiencing right now is my own connection — through the wine — to historical figures I admire, to my childhood and memories of playing outdoors in Summer, to Germany and my immigrant great-great-great grandparents I never knew, to a man named Fritz Haag and his son (grandson?) Oliver who currently runs the winery and wears similar glasses to my own. These men have created a wine that’s set loose my fancy and let it fly; when I take that bike trip, I’m definitely going to look them up.

It’s not the kind of connectedness that I was aiming to experience, but it’s more than I got from drinking my daily Diet Coke at lunch — would it were a Radler!

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I recently purchased Karen MacNeil’s Wine Bibleand have been delighting in her meticulous research. With the friendliest, most approachable tone she explains the history and culture of each wine region, all the intricacies of the climate and soil there, the types of grapes that thrive its environment, the major wineries to know, how to visit them, and on and on. It’s fascinating. And better than that, it’s useful.

In her intro she lists five qualities that a taster has to assess in order to determine if a wine is truly great. Now, I know how snobby that seems — Heineken and Corona don’t make these demands! — but I’ve come to think of wine the way I think of literature. I’ve read many a book that I did not enjoy, but whose greatness was clear and identifiable. If you take Shakespeare, for example, I’m sure you couldn’t find anyone who would deny his greatness as a writer, but you can find plenty who don’t enjoy his work because it can be impenetrable. For those who take the time to get past the difficulty of understanding his poetic language, however, the richness, beauty and brilliance of his words spill forth. So, too, with wine. If it is snobbish to take the time to develop an appreciation for the complexities of wine, it is the same of trying to understand high literature, in which case so be it: you can call me a snob. I’ve been called a lot worse.

But I digress. MacNeil’s five qualities are these: Varietal Character, Integration, Expressiveness, Complexity and Connectedness. At the end of her first section on mastering wine she writes the following:

Admittedly, a wine’s integration, expressiveness, complexity and connectedness (or lack thereof) may not be immediately obvious. But if you taste the wine slowly and think about these concepts, they’ll soon begin to make sense. It’s also fun to get an even greater demand of these traits through some practice. So here’s your wine homework: To discover what integration means, buy a white Burgundy, such as Meursault, and think about harmony. For expressiveness, try a New Zealand sauvignon blanc and consider its intensity. Go looking for complexity by drinking a mature (ten years old or more) top-notch Bordeaux or Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon. And connectedness, though hard to describe, is easy to find. Try a Côte-Rôtie from the northern Rhône, with its almost savage peppery flavors, or a shimmeringly tart riesling from the Mosel region of Germany. Neither of these wines could come from anywhere other than the place it did. (6)

Wine homework? Yes, please!

My next several wine posts will be reports on my homework, starting from the end of the list: a Mosel riesling. I hope you’ll find them as much fun to read as I’m sure they will be to write!